Review: Fractal Design Node 605 Chassis

Today we are taking a look at the Fractal Design Node 605. The Node 605 is designed as a quiet, high quality, large form factor HTPC chassis. It can house a full ATX motherboard, and graphics cards up to 280mm (~11 inches) in length.

The chassis is all black brushed aluminum, giving it quite a stylish appearance. It would fit quite well in any high end home theater system, at least speaking from an aesthetics standpoint. To access the I/O ports, one simply flips out the front panel door, providing access to the optional slim optical drive bay, a Firewire port, 2 USB 3.0 ports, a headphone jack, a microphone jack, and a card reader that supports MicroSD, compact flash, and standard SD cards.

The chassis itself was quite roomy. We had no issues fitting in a full ATX X58 system. Building inside the chassis was also quite easy, including putting in a GTX 260 which required simply unscrewing and removing one of the HDD trays to put in the graphics card. Once the graphics card was in place we put the HDD tray back in. Putting the rest of the computer together was much like any other standard ATX chassis.

The case is designed to sit horizontally in a home theater setting, unlike a normal desktop tower that stands vertically. We found it to be very quiet, as it comes with two Fractal Design Silent Series R2 fans, as well as insulation along the inside of the top panel of the chassis to dampen noise.

Overall, we were quite impressed with the Node 605 as it fills an interesting niche, a high powered, high quality, full size HTPC system. It allows users to put a full gaming desktop in their living room, and have it fit in perfectly. The price is currently listed at $159.99 on Newegg. For the user who appreciates style as well as the potential for power and expandability for their HTPC system, the Fractal Design Node 605 is worth every penny.